Law Vs. Halachah On Child Abandonment

Nebraska lawmakers agree on safe-haven age limit

LINCOLN, Neb. – Stung by the abandonments of children as old as 17 under Nebraska’s brand-new safe-haven law, the governor and lawmakers agreed Monday to narrow the law’s broad wording to protect only the parents of newborns from prosecution.

Forty of the Legislature’s 49 senators would amend the law so it applies only to infants up to 3 days old, legislative Speaker Mike Flood said at a news conference. The age cap would change the Nebraska law from the most lenient to one of the nation’s most restrictive.

At least 18 children, the youngest 22 months and many of them teens, have been abandoned since the law took effect in July. Nebraska’s law doesn’t define the word “child,” so it has been interpreted to let anyone leave child up to age 18 at a state-licensed hospital without fear of prosecution for the abandonment.

Most states let parents and guardians drop off children who are up to a month old at hospitals or other safe institutions. Sixteen states have a 3-day-old age cap such as the one agreed to in Nebraska.

Every state has a safe-haven law, which is meant to save the lives of unwanted infants.

Halachah has virtually the opposite position on abandonment, at least with respect to mothers; a mother can be compelled, in certain cases, to nurse an infant, but she may walk away from older children and demand that the community take responsibility for them:

The difference between law and Halachah is due to their approaching the question of abandonment from opposite perspectives. In contemporary law, child abandonment is a criminal offense under state laws, and in some cases can even be a felony. In Halachah, on the other hand, there is no basic prohibition against abandonment, and the duties of the parents are defined solely in terms of their specific, mostly financial, obligations to the child. Since the duties of child support are generally only incumbent upon the father, the mother is free to abandon her offspring.

Indeed, the exception that we have seen, that a divorcee can be compelled to nurse her infant if the father is unable to arrange for a wet nurse, is actually challenged by the Helkas MeHokek and the Beis Shmuel on the basis of the general princple that a woman is perfectly entitled to abandon her children:

So according to both Beis Meir and Rav Wahrmann, although, as we have seen, a woman is not responsible in principle to support her offspring, she is nevertheless obligated to do so by the laws of Zedakkah, insofar as she has the requisite resources (and the paternal relatives do not).

Incidentally, I am rather mystified by Rav Wahrmann’s language6. Is he really unsure whether obligating a womon to care for an infant is לא חסר, and is freedom from such an obligation really only a question of מנוח יותר? Has he ever tried to care for an infant, who generally needs to eat every few hours, for an extended period of time, and does he really consider sleep a mere luxury?